


Cauterized

by Saintduma



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Cannibalism, Depression, Divorce, FrostIron - Freeform, Frostironbang, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Post-IM3, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Surgery, Therapy, amnesiac!Loki, depressed!Loki, did I mention depression? there's a lot of depression, thanos - Freeform, you people are going to hate me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-23
Updated: 2013-09-23
Packaged: 2017-12-27 09:56:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 16,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/977410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saintduma/pseuds/Saintduma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the Frostiron Bang!</p><p>My heroic artist was glasslogic, who blew my mind by coming in at the last second to save me from being artist-less!<br/>You can find the master post for all this wonderful art here:<br/>http://glasslogic.livejournal.com/41773.html</p><p>A sick perversion of the Starbucks Barista!Loki trope: after failing to conquer the world with the Chitauri, Loki is subjected to the memory-erasing Ryðja Sál by the Asgardians, and cast back to Midgard.  Tony, having finally recovered from having the arc reactor removed, finds him serving ice cream on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  Hearts get carved out of chests, suicides occur, depression and self-hatred set in, and Loki and Tony are forced to claw their way towards a functional existence while trying to avert a world-ending threat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Hey, I’m going to need you to close today, alright?” 

Loki looked up at his shift manager and nodded, turning his attention to the young woman on the other side of the counter. “Did you want whip cream?” he asked her. She didn’t look up or respond, tapping her phone screen furiously. Loki checked the name on the receipt. “Rachel?” She looked up, expecting to be handed her ice cream. He held up the whip cream container. “Did you want whipped cream on that Birthday Cake Remix?” 

“I told the girl yes,” she snapped, referring to the fourty-something mother of three that was Loki’s shift manager. 

“Just wanted to make sure,” he replied, smiling anyway, because that was what Coldstone wanted him to do. With a flash of his hands the ice cream was topped, and he pushed the ice cream and a spoon across the little counter to the girl. “Thank you,” he smiled. She scowled, snatched the treat, and returned her attention to her phone. 

“Heads up,” Marielle, his shift manager, murmured. Loki looked up to see a large group of young teenagers walking in, talking loudly and shoving each other. He opened another chocolate syrup bottle. 

========

Twelve waffle cones, two sundaes, three smoothies, and a very paltry tip later, Loki was scrubbing down the mixing counter and keenly aware of the fact that Marielle would be leaving him with the new girl for the next six hours very soon. He wasn’t bitter that he was being forced to pick up more shift time: he needed all he could get, and Marielle had three kids. He was bitter that management couldn’t be bothered to hire new people that actually wanted to work. The new girl had to be prodded to show anything like initiative, and in a busy ice cream shop mid-summer, that just didn’t work. 

“I’m gonna clean off those tables, can you hold down the fort?” 

Loki nodded to Marielle and continued furiously scrubbing the mixing counter. Movement at the register brought him, wiping his hands on a towel, to the point of sale screen, and the man began to rattle off his order. 

“All large: two chocolate devotion, one peanut butter cup perfection, three birthday cake remix, one apple pie remix, one mint ice cream with oreo and banana, one caramel crunch, and a blueberry pineapple smoothie.” It was far too fast for Loki to keep up scrawling on a piece of receipt paper, and he glanced up, wondering how the hell the guy was expecting to carry out nine ice creams and a drink on his own. “I’m shitting you, just the blueberry smoothie” the man grinned, made eye contact, and suddenly frowned. “Loki?”

Loki made eye contact, and something in his gut turned. He shifted his weight back, and felt an amplification of what he usually did when someone said his name like that-- like they recognized him. It was always surprise at first, and then it was anger, and then sometimes they looked like they might say something, but instead they would stalk away in anger, or run, or sometimes hit him. 

Sometimes, hit him a lot.

This felt like a ‘hit him a lot’ moment. It showed on his face, or must have, because the man raised his hands, fingers spread, palms out, the universally accepted pose people used to assure spooked animals and small children. 

“Hey, what’s that, I’m not going to throw you out a window or anything,” the man said, with the sort of smile that indicated there was an inside joke to be had, but Loki was missing it. 

“I’m just trying to do my job, I don’t know who you are,” Loki said, quietly, hoping to defuse whatever was going on. He was feeling ridiculously jumpy. 

“Right. Does Thor know you’re here, with this... charade or whatever?” The man pulled out a phone, and held it up, pointing the see-through screen at Loki. Little images began to pop up around the edge, and the goateed man began to tap on the screen, frowning. 

“Thor,” Loki whispered, feeling a shuddering in his chest. 

“Yeah, Thor. Last I knew he was making sure you weren’t going to be pulling any more--”

“Oh, my-- Mr. Stark?” Loki’s heart was starting to race, and he was relieved to hear Marielle butting into the conversation. Three kids made her a huge relief to Loki when people recognized him-- she had the ability to calm anyone down, even the people who started yelling about what a “sick fuck” he was. “Mr. Stark, I think-- Loki, you can go take your break, be back in fifteen.” Loki started to turn, grateful for the excuse.

“No, you are not leaving my sight,” ‘Mr. Stark’ interrupted, reaching over the counter and grabbing Loki’s wrist. Marielle crossed the shop to stand next to the man, looking up with all of the considerable authority motherhood bestowed on her five-foot-four frame. 

“Mr. Stark, you are not incorrect about who Loki is, but please let go of my employee. He-- he doesn’t know.”

“Did he use the spear on you? You don’t look like Barton did.” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Loki’s never even raised his voice-- not even when some kid took a chair to him last month after he recognized him. Let him go.”

“A chair.” The man’s grip on Loki tightened, and he started to drag him over the counter. “He brought down half of Manhattan over a familial spat and you’re upset some kid hit him with a chair?” Loki was pulling back, but the man was much stronger than he looked, and faster. He took two steps back suddenly, and Loki was in a heap on the floor, arm twisted painfully.

“Let me go,” he heard himself sob, the wrenching that had started in his gut working its way up around his heart and throat now. 

The man stopped, and looked down at him with brows knit in confusion. “What?”

“Please,” Loki sobbed again. “Please let me go. I have no idea who you are. Please.” 

He was rewarded with a hard shaking, the man jerking him back and forth. “You threw me out of a fucking skyscraper and you’re pretending you don’t know who I am?”

“I am not pretending!” Loki cried. Marielle had finally managed to get between them and shoved the man back, and he let go, heartily confused. 

“You know who he is, right?” he demanded of Marielle. 

“Of course I do,” she snarled.

“And you’re letting him make fucking ice cream for the Lower East Side.”

“He’s a damned hard worker. I don’t know what happened to him. All I know is that it broke my damn heart when he walked in with half his jaw smashed in and begged me not to fire him for being late because some vigilante decided to take a brick to his face.”

The man looked down at Loki, who had not dared to move from where he’d left him. Loki felt like his heart was going to explode in his chest, it was racing so fast. Being assaulted wasn’t new. Something about this was, though, or at least as far as Loki could remember. He’d never felt so scared before. The name ‘Thor’ ricocheted through his chest, which did not at all help the sense that his insides might spontaneously liquefy, or already had. 

“He’s really good at the manipulation thing. I had a turn in a turbine from an escapade he orchestrated from the inside of a Hulk-proof tank once.” 

“You look at him and you tell me he’s fucking faking. I don’t care who he was, Mr. Stark, but now he’s just another one of the teeming masses trying to make their way in the world who’s getting an awful lot of shit for something he doesn’t remember.”

“And you really think he should get exonerated for bringing the Chitauri--”

Loki was seeing stars. The word Chitauri brought a name exploding into his head that had him lurching to his feet and scrambling for the door in a blind panic. 

“Loki--” he heard Marielle, but he had to run. He had to run because that name was chasing him, hounding him, howling for his blood and something else that he didn’t understand, a wolf bigger than the world. 

“Loki!” That was the man, shouting his name out of the front of the Coldstone. 

But he was still running from that other name.

_Thanos._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: explicit surgery

“Good morning.”

The voice was sandpaper against the inside of Loki’s head. He wanted to open his eyes, but he couldn’t. Clammy fingertips pulled his eyelids up, and there were a pair of gray eyes behind a splatter shield and a surgical mask. 

“It took a long time to figure out how much paralytic would keep you down and let you be awake enough to feel this.” 

The face moved, and there was a mirror above him. He was lying on a steel table, a cloth over his groin, and he realized, sluggishly, that he was very, very cold. The top of the man’s head was visible, thick sandy hair under a hair net. At the edge of his vision-- he couldn’t move his eyes-- he could see another table, and a hand. And a table of knives and saws. 

“Your metabolic rate isn’t as high as I thought it would be. Still phenomenal in comparison to a human, but low for where I pictured an Asgardian.”

His heart started to race again. He couldn’t swallow, couldn’t move his tongue. 

“Not that I have any experience. I never got clearance to look at what information we had on you or Thor. Not that we had time to get much on you besides video, I think.” As the man talked, he picked up a scalpel. He pressed on Loki’s chest with a gloved hand and the blade bit into his skin. “You bleed like the rest of us, at least.” Loki had never experienced this kind of pain, in the two years he could remember. It was clean, and burned. The knife came back, starting to slice through muscles. And then a third time, through more tissue. He heard it clang as the man threw it away and picked up another. 

“The blades dull pretty quickly, and even faster on your skin,” the man said, starting to cut across his chest in the other direction. “This isn’t how we’d normally open up a chest. But what the hell, you’re a god, we might as well see what we can do. See? The top of your chest is already trying to heal a little.” The knife flicked back, reversing whatever progress his body had made, and cutting through another layer of tissue crossways again. “We’ll have to make this pretty quick. Good thing we got your friend Iron Man prepped already.” 

Loki felt that squirming in his stomach again, but it was the edge of his consciousness in comparison to the sheer agony he felt as the man started to score under his flesh, pulling back quarters of his chest and sliding metal hooks through the edge of his skin and attaching them to the outer parts of his chest, holding the flesh and skin away from his ribcage. 

He could see his heart pumping furiously under a bloody set of ribs. There was the clatter of the second scalpel going into a trash bin. Loki had spent just enough time in hospitals over the last two years to know that was not standard procedure. This was not a hospital. 

“I’m sad we’re going to have to go so fast. But you’re doing brilliantly so far, there’s a consolation.” 

The man had a chisel and mallet. This could not possibly be standard procedure. Loki wished his brain would shut down-- would leave him unconscious. But he’d never been unconscious before now. Somewhere he knew he could handle much worse pain than this, and this was agony. The man lined up the chisel, and with a certainty that was terrifying, cleanly broke the ribs to one side of his sternum. 

“I had to try this while you were unconscious to know how hard to hit and where. I was surprised that your anatomy looked so much like a human’s. I even got a peek at that beautiful heart of yours. Four chambers. I expected something much more exotic. The healing factor, however, is admirable. That was about an hour ago.” A series of quick, precise cracks. The man pulled one side of his ribs entirely away from his lung, severing more bits of tissue cleanly and easily with yet another scalpel. “It would be easier with an assistant, but hey, when you get the chance to operate, you take it.” 

The edges of his skin were trying to close, but the hooks in his flesh were preventing it. The man had a fourth scalpel, and had begun to dig into Loki’s chest. If he had any governance of his body, he would be screaming. The man didn’t really seem to care how sloppy he was being with that knife-- he was hacking at the tissues and blood vessels without regard of Loki’s lungs. Loki realized he hadn’t drawn breath at all. As alarming a realization it was, it didn’t hurt. 

“Ah, there we are,” the man purred, pulling free a lump of flesh with one gloved hand. Loki stared, unable for a moment to recognize it for what it was: his heart. 

Beating.

The man reached up and touched a button on the edge of the mirror, and part of it displayed the other table. There were a lot more machines by this table, occupied by the man that had dragged him over the counter back at Starbucks. He had a tube down his throat, and more stuck into his neck and running under a sheet over his lower body. Some effort, it seemed, was being made to make sure he wasn’t too cold. 

His chest had been pulled open, and his ribs had already been cracked and splayed, but his heart was still attached. The man put Loki’s beating heart into a shallow metal dish, and changed his gloves. From a table beside Stark’s he picked up a threaded needle, and began to very carefully tie off the surrounding blood vessels while neatly and meticulously freeing the heart of its surrounds. There was no cavalier digging around in Stark’s chest. The man wanted him alive.

He lifted the human heart free and put it into a second metal dish, and then looked up at whatever camera was recording this to be displayed on the mirror above Loki. “And now for the grand ‘let’s see what happens’!”

Loki watched, unable to even blink, as the man began to line Loki’s heart up in Stark’s anatomy. “Ah, I thought so. I don’t even have to do a temporary suture. Your heart starts bonding immediately.” He continued to work, and somewhere in the hole in Loki’s chest he could feel what the man was doing-- moving, adjusting, tweaking as his heart grasped for its surroundings, foreign or not. “I don’t even have it all connected up yet and he’s trying to heal around his flesh hooks.”

On the part of the mirror above him that wasn’t displaying what the man was doing to Stark, Loki could see his blood vessels growing and reaching for his missing heart. They would meet and connect, other tissues beginning to fill the void. Tendons were reaching up for his displaced ribs, crawling up the bloody bones. His body was trying to close, starting to tear itself free of the flesh hooks. 

“There we are. All done.” On the display, the man was settling Stark’s ribcage back in place. The sound of flesh starting to slide back into place was coming from both of them-- Loki didn’t know how to describe the sound. What he imagined a snake moving over wet grass would sound like. “I wonder how many pieces of you we could put into different people. If we could just cut you into a million slices and distribute you to all the sickest people in the world, if you would heal them all. Would you still be alive, then? Would you be conscious, part of all of those people? Would you try to rule them, too?” He had pulled the flesh hooks out of Stark’s skin, which sealed over his chest immediately. “It was very nice of him to get that hunk of metal out before this happened. It would have been tricky to operate around.” 

He picked up the dish with Tony’s heart on it and came over to Loki’s table again, tapping the display, and it went back to being a mirror. Loki’s skin had torn itself almost completely free of the flesh hooks already. The muscles were knitting across his chest, adjusting and settling. He was still bleeding, but not nearly so much, and less as his skin reasserted its place. “Time to start waking up Tony. He’ll be displeased, I expect.” He left the heart beside Loki and disappeared from view. He could hear some sort of monitor changing tempo. “Hello, Mr. Stark. No, really, don’t feel awkward you don’t know me: I was unimportant, on the Helicarrier. Not a big deal. Besides, you’ll find you won’t be able to move. You or your old friend, Mr. Odinson.” 

A corner display came up again, and Loki could see Tony staring, unmoving, down at him. “I thought you’d like to be able to see each other while we get moving. I’ve prepared for a recipe for your heart, Mr. Stark.” The man appeared at Loki’s side, and he picked up the dish with the heart again, and pulled something into view. It was a hot plate. There were dishes beside it: one with flour, oil, onions, something that smelled like minced garlic. The man disappeared with the heart and Loki could hear water running. He returned, the heart rinsed, and poured some oil on a pan on the hot plate. He proceeded to cut Tony’s heart into very thin slices with an easy certainty. The slices were cut across, so they were only slightly thinner than bacon, and perhaps an inch long each. 

On the screen above, Tony could not move his expression, but Loki knew he could see, and his eyes showed his horror. 

The man tossed the slices of heart in the flour lightly, and lay one into the pan. It sizzled. Satisfied, the man put the rest in, and stirred them, humming to himself tunelessly. After a few minutes, he stirred in the slices of onion and garlic, and then covered the pan. 

“Now, please. Do not think me a monster. I’m not a cannibal. The thought of eating any part of another human is absolutely disgusting. However, dire circumstances will turn anyone into a cannibal, or so history shows us.”

Another display popped up on the mirror above Loki. He didn’t recognize the woman offhand, but she was beautiful. Strawberry blonde hair and smooth, milky skin covered a face that looked sadly hollow. She was curled in the corner of a cement cell, leaning against the wall, eyes half-closed. Her lips were chapped and Loki could see her fingernails were torn and ragged. 

“Pepper Potts. I believe you finally married her recently, didn’t you, Tony? But she kept her name. I wonder if she doesn’t want to be another accessory for you. You do keep such a collection of accessories.”

Loki felt like he might vomit, despite the paralytics. He might not have recognized Pepper, but Tony had. Loki knew because his heart was now going insane against the inside of Tony’s chest, responding to the stress of seeing Pepper clearly starved and exhausted. Tony was horrified on a level that Loki hadn’t even begun to approach-- and terrified on Pepper’s behalf. 

Since waking up at the bottom of the Marcus Garvey Swimming Pool two years ago during an insane storm, Loki had never felt so strongly about another person. He’d felt afraid of people, and sorry for them, but he had never felt so singularly frightened on someone’s behalf-- so-- so attached. Loki felt like a voyeur. Tony could not live without this woman. And this monster of a human was going to feed her Tony’s heart.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: explicit cannibalism

“Poetic, isn’t it?” The man was plating Tony’s cooked heart from the covered pan onto a bed of mashed potatoes. 

Tony gave a strangled, angry sound. 

“Ah. I should have expected your tolerance to skyrocket,” the man said, setting the plate down and disappearing for a moment before Loki could see him injecting Tony’s IV with something. 

He picked up the plate again and was gone. Loki heard Tony give another strangled, quieter sound, and he could feel his heart in Tony’s chest keening in pain. The human’s emotions had already completely overtaken Loki’s borrowed physiology.

Loki had no real sense of time, but it seemed like rather a long time before a metal flap opened in the door in the concrete room where Pepper was huddled, and a deep dish was pushed through. She sat up immediately, her eyes wide, and crept towards it on all fours, animalistic. Loki wondered how long they had been unconscious. The expression on her face when she saw the food made him think it had been several days. 

She picked up the plate and cradled it on her lap. She picked up a piece of the meat, and with a pained expression, forced herself to eat just a little bite of it. He wondered why she didn’t inhale the food-- did she know it was Tony’s heart? With how carefully she was eating, despite obviously being starving, he didn’t think that could be the case. She would have eaten the potatoes first. It occurred to him, suddenly, that this might not be the first time she was so starved. 

They could have been unconscious for weeks. There was no knowing.

Silently, they watched her eat. She was being methodical, slow, and when she was about halfway through the plate, she stopped, but didn’t put it down. 

Hours passed. Every so often, she would eat a few bites, but she didn’t let the dish touch the floor again. The man returned, and injected both Loki and Tony again, and then left, leaving them to watch her very slowly finish eating Tony’s heart and lick the plate clear. Only when that was finished did she put the dish down. 

Finally she seemed to fall asleep against the wall. Loki wondered how much longer they were going to be there, awake. The man hadn’t come back yet. The paralytics weren’t wearing off. It was giving Loki entirely too much time to think.

He knew he healed quickly-- unnaturally so. That day the kid had taken a chair to him, he’d broken several ribs. It had only been an hour or so before he wasn’t in pain any more. He should have drowned at the bottom of that pool, but he’d dragged himself out without a problem. He’d promptly been mugged and stabbed repeatedly, the gold stolen off of the heavy outfit he’d woken up in, and had still walked away from it. He had never gotten sick, even when the depths of winter had arrived. He had been cold, and woken up several times under snow or soaked in freezing rain, but had never been terribly uncomfortable. 

Hunger had been a problem. That was finally what had him following other homeless to soup kitchens, and how he had ended up at Coldstone, working for Marielle. Her sister had recognized him, under the grime and rags, and told him his first name. 

No one had ever told him what he had done that was so horrible that people could attack him in broad daylight in front of police, and the police, on recognizing him, turned their heads. 

He knew he was other. It was all he knew. Asgardian-- that word had never been used to talk about him before this psychotic man. Odinson meant nothing to him, except to give him that twisting in his guts, like the name Thor. 

He wished he could sleep. 

==============

More paralytics had been applied, and Loki was just starting to work out that it had been about nine hours since he’d been woken up. Every so often he would feel waves of emotion from Tony-- desperation, anger, fear. It was usually when Pepper did something onscreen. Mostly, now, she slept. The rest of the time he just felt Tony-- he didn’t really know how to describe it. He’d heard people use the word ‘obsessed’. Tony felt obsessed with her.

There was a sudden, loud sound, and relief washed over Tony, echoing through Loki, though he didn’t understand why. 

He heard two pops, and something hit the ground, hard. And then someone was standing over him-- a wild amount of red hair and a small face with huge eyes. The woman pursed her lips, and glanced over her shoulder. 

“Clint, do you have an analytic on Stark already?”

“Give me ten seconds, Tasha.” There was a beeping. “Holy shit. He should be dead.” 

“Well, he’s not.” She disappeared from Loki’s vision, and came back with a device she put over where his heart had been. It pricked his skin and she frowned down at him. “Is this reading right? It’s showing an identical level in Loki.”

“When have Tony’s toys ever been wrong?”

“Point.” She pulled something off of her belt and it stung his skin again, and for the first time in nine hours, he blinked. 

“Pepper,” they heard hoarsely whispered from the other table. 

“Cap’s got her,” Loki heard ‘Clint’ say. 

There was a metallic click and Loki could only see the ceiling as ‘Tasha’ started to roll him away. He was blinking more, and he could begin to move his tongue. Whatever she’d given him, it was careening through his system. His toes were twitching. 

“Don’t push it, Loki,” she said to him in an undertone. “It’s an unpleasant drug to strain.” She seemed to know. He could feel Tony was pushing it. 

“Tell Stark,” he croaked. 

“Stark knows.” 

She wheeled him through a pair of doors and Loki could see at the edge of his eyes a large black van pull up. Out of it came a few people in dark fatigues. The woman disappeared from sight and someone wrapped him in a blanket, and lifted him onto some kind of board. They strapped him down, but he didn’t protest. They were getting him out of there. And if Stark was relieved, it was bound to be an improvement of his previous condition. 

He was slid into the back of the van, and the woman with the red curls climbed into the back with a few of the people in fatigues, and they were moving. No one spoke. Loki gave a sound as Tony had some huge burst of relief-- he was pretty certain Tony was crying. He felt wetness slide down his face, and realized he was, too. The redheaded woman was frowning down at him. 

“My heart,” he managed to whisper. “In Stark. He put my heart in Stark.” 

The woman put a finger to her ear.

“Clint, isolate Stark from Potts.” A moment. “I don’t care what Potts says, keep him isolated until we get them through a full check. Loki said Turner put his heart in Stark.” She looked down at Loki. “And Thor was right. He doesn’t even respond properly to his name. He’s in complete fugue.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: explicit suicide

“We’ll take care of him.”

The woman Tony loved said it with complete and utter certainty. All eyes in the room turned to her, and Tony began to speak, but she shushed him with a raised hand. 

“There’s no question,” she continued. “We can’t grow Tony a new heart with his new blood and it sustain him. We can’t use old samples to replicate and grow because his system has already acclimated to the new cell processing, which also rules out other transplants. And any mechanical heart we come up with, or he comes up with, simply aren’t going to be able to sustain the new cell structures. So Tony keeps Loki’s heart. Loki apparently doesn’t need one, but with the emotional side effects... it’s unfair to turn him loose on anyone else. It’s something we’ll have to acclimate to.” 

The problem was that everyone in the room already knew that all she’d said was true. Some of them had even read and understood the test results. Loki was not among those that understood what the results said, but he did understand that Tony did not at all like that Pepper had thought this through so thoroughly, because the resistance he felt was slowly crumbling. 

Tony glared at him, knowing Loki was aware of it, and for what felt like the thousandth time, Loki felt guilty, though none of this was his fault by any stretch of the imagination. 

“I can just go back to Coldstone,” Loki said quietly.

“No, you can’t.” That was Natasha Romanoff, the beautiful, solemn woman on the other side of Pepper. “If some revenge-bent idiot manages to kill you, or even knock you unconscious, it’s likely you’ll take Tony down with you. And that’s not a risk SHIELD is willing to take.”

“You don’t have to take me in,” Loki replied, looking at Pepper. “I’m not your problem. SHIELD can find some place for me doing filing somewhere or something.”

“This isn’t negotiable,” Pepper said. “Your health and safety is Tony’s health and safety. I’m not leaving that in anyone’s hands but mine and Tony’s.”

“Do I not get a say in this?” Tony was irritable.

“No.” Pepper was resolute. “Is that acceptable for SHIELD?”

“Just keep us in the loop if he remembers anything.” Director Maria Hill smiled, and stood, shaking Pepper’s hand. 

Tony shook his head. “You know, when I said we could get a dog...”

Loki looked at his hands, humiliated.

===============

The elevator was tense, and silent. The four days on the Helicarrier had not afforded them any time to talk, and what time they had spent in the same room, they spent answering questions, not discussing anything among themselves. He could feel Tony’s effort to keep his frustrations about the new addition to the household quiet. Loki’s eyes stayed on his shoes. 

A dog. A pet. Loki had no more liberty of choice than a hound. No matter who took charge of him, he was an animal to these people, and maybe that’s all he really was. Maybe that was why people hated him so much. He was a venomous animal. A danger to public health. He was better sliced up and chemically replicated to heal the ills of the world than loose among its people; a dangerous exotic creature worth preserving for medical science alone. 

The doors slid open, and they had barely stepped out when Tony raised an arm in front of Pepper and Loki, shifting to obscure Pepper from view. Someone was standing in the middle of the living room, arms crossed over his chest. The young man had wild dark hair and was wearing black, dust-covered military-style clothing. A filthy black trenchcoat was draped over the back of the couch.

“Where have you three been?” the young man demanded. “I’ve been here six hours and JARVIS couldn’t tell me shit.”

Tony’s lips thinned with displeasure. “Coney Island. Who are you?” 

Loki realized he had also moved in front of Pepper subconsciously. He didn’t change position. 

“I’m your son. You can run genetic tests if you want, I’m a perfect three-way split, you’re the one who figured it out, blah blah bl-- shit.” The young man had made eye contact with Loki. “It’s too late. You’re fucked.”

“I-- what--” Loki’s hand went to his chest.

“Not the heart thing. The depression.” The wild-haired young man took a step forward. “Listen--” he stopped suddenly, looking at Tony. “It’s not going to work. I blocked the suits. You’ll have access again when I’m gone.”

“You want to tell me why you can block my suits?” Loki held his breath. The anger in Tony was controlled, careful, but frightening. 

“It’s in JARVIS. I had to. Seriously, you’re two seconds from beating my ass-- I know that look, I’m your kid.”

“I’ve never been pregnant,” Pepper spoke up. Loki moved more in front of her when the young man’s green eyes found her face. That was all Tony in instinct. 

“It... it’s complicated. Thirty years from now-- or-- or from before I decided to come back-- time streams split, mine doesn’t exist any more except... well-- it’s complicated--”

“You’re fucking with us.” Tony’s growl made Loki nervous, but he was angry with him. The line between whose emotions belonged to whom was... blurry.

“JARVIS?” The young man raised his hands, and a holographic visual appeared, streams of data spiderwebbed from his fingers and condensed into an organically round object between his palms. He expanded the space between his hands and the density of the data became clear. “It requires an extreme catalyst. I put seven months just trying to make sure Thanos wouldn’t be able to follow the divinity singularity.” 

Thanos. Loki felt an insane shock of fear course through his body, and Tony gasped in surprise, feeling it as well. He glared at Loki, angry at the emotional intrusion. 

“Sorry,” Loki whispered, his eyes going to his shoes. 

“Don’t be,” the young man said. “That’s how scared you should be. When I left, Husk conversion was at ninety-eight percent an already decimated human population. It’s what he does; he strips humans of identity and will and soul to make them pliable. Survivors call them Husks, but by now-- by then-- it’s what humanity will be. The tipping point was four years ago.”

“Twenty-six years from now,” Pepper corrected quietly, eyes on the young man’s face, searching, curious, doubtful. 

“JARVIS, do you have that genetic display for Mum?” A new hologram appeared, showing images of the three of them, examples of combined bone structure, dominant and recessive trait combinations. 

“Tony,” she said quietly, her eyes moving between the information and the young man’s dirty face. “Tony, he’s ours.”

“How is he Loki’s too?” Tony asked, distracted from the time travel by this. 

“He...” the young man clearly struggled, avoiding looking at Loki. “He left his divinity for you to give me. And you had enough genetic data and materials harvested...”

“Divinity?” This was the second time the young man had used the word, and it confused Loki. Tony was a little nervous when Loki repeated the word, under the fascination with all of the new information and excitement over its implication. Loki went to the other word he wanted to know the implications of. “What do you mean-- harvested?”

“I mean... harvested,” the young man said. He was very carefully not making eye contact.

“This... depression... tell me?”

“It’s different now,” the young man said, quickly. “I’ve altered the time stream just being here. It’s not an absolute any more.”

“Tell me, please,” Loki whispered. 

“I... you...” he looked at Pepper, and for a moment he looked very young. He needed help. 

“It’s okay,” she soothed, touching his hand lightly. 

“You left me everything you figured out how to do,” he whispered. “You wrote all the spells you relearned. But you didn’t survive long enough to learn the Ryðja Sál again. I’m not sure you even understood that was what had happened.”

Ryðja Sál stirred recognition, but Loki couldn’t place it. “What is that?”

“Ryðja Sál-- it’s like-- it means empty soul. It’s like-- tabula rasa. Blank slate. It’s something-- something you know-- there’s evidence you could do it, once. Or came close. I think it could be what might undo Thanos, if someone could actually do it to him. You could have. I could have but-- it’s research intensive, and I didn’t have any resources.”

“It was done to me?” Loki’s voice was still very quiet. “What did I do?”

“What you had to.”

“Why... why did I not teach you the spells myself?” 

“You died. You... you killed yourself.”

Silence. Tony was staring at Loki; Pepper, at the young man. 

“I... I would never...” Loki protested, mostly to Tony. 

“Maybe you won’t. It’s all different now. I came back-- it could all change. You might have time to undo it, to master it and use it on Thanos. You have to survive to do it. All three of you need to survive.” The young man looked at Tony, and squeezed Pepper’s hand. “Everything I had for data-- all of it-- it’s all on JARVIS. Ryðja Sál, Husks, Thanos, all my notes, all the notes I could find from SHIELD and Bruce and Natasha. Steve’s journals. I left you everything I had.” He let Pepper’s hand go, and took a step away. He pulled something out of his clothes. 

“What are you doing?” Tony recognized the object as a gun before either Pepper or Loki.

“The longer I’m here, the bigger the warp trace, the higher the risk of Thanos finding what I did-- the longer that stream exists for him to do it.” 

“All this data changes things too, your presence can’t amplify the risk that much--” Tony’s words made Loki realize that it wasn’t just him that was suddenly desperate to keep the stranger alive. 

“It’s a magic thing, Dad. You’ll figure it out soon enough when you start manifesting.” 

“Please,” Pepper whispered. 

The young man was raising the gun to his head.

“I love you.”

Loki moved. 

He felt the blast sear through his wrist first, and then scatter a few inches into his shoulder, and then registered the gun falling to the floor. Between his hand and his chest was the chunky, hollow remains of the young man’s skull, the half closer to his chest completely collapsed under his dirty black hair. 

“No, no,” Loki choked, something crashing through him suddenly. The room was brighter, but the space between him and the young man’s body was dark. He was pulling, and part of the skull started to wrench back into place. He continued to strain, the skull slowly dragging itself back together piece by piece, but he was pressing further down with this-- this fire-- trying to pull something back into the body. 

He heard someone falling to the floor.

“Stop,” Pepper cried. “Stop, stop--” her hands were there, pushing at Loki’s chest. “Loki stop, Loki-- Loki you’re killing yourself-- Loki you’re killing Tony--”

Loki could suddenly feel Tony’s terror, and the supernal force dissipated with his distraction. Tony was on all fours, gasping for air, and Pepper was trying to push Loki away from the corpse in his hands, her arms covered in blood, her face written with panic. 

Loki let go, and looked down at the reformed face of the young man who had said he was his son. 

Loki began to sob. “He, he never... he never gave us his name.”


	5. Chapter 5

“You’re more fucking useless than DUM-E.” 

Loki continued to stare down at his papers, printed images of the notes he had apparently left his son to help him learn spells. He tried desperately to secret away the pain that choked his chest when Tony growled at him, but he knew that Tony could feel it. He tried to put it away anyway. 

They were written in what looked like scribble to him. It didn’t look like letters in any language he knew existed on earth, and by now, he’d had JARVIS show him every written language and every code and they were all crushing at the inside of his brain-- and looking nothing, to him, like what was on this page. Not even Ancient Norse looked like this. 

Five months had passed since the heart swapping. Five months since the boy had blown his brains out against Loki’s chest. Five months since Loki had almost killed himself and Tony trying to bring the child back. Five months since he’d done any kind of magic.

“That’s it,” Pepper snapped, and dropped the book she’d been reading on the coffee table with a crack that made Loki wince. “I’m done, Tony. I’ve told you about twelve thousand times to stop talking to him like that, and I’m not going to listen to it over Christmas, too.” She marched over to the fireplace and ripped her stocking off of its hook next to Tony’s. “I’m leaving. JARVIS?”

“Yes, Pepper?” 

“I am disallowing him contacting me except in cases of extreme need. Getting drunk and being an asshole does not qualify as extreme need. Notify me when he’s managed to actually cohabitate with Loki without being nasty to him for six straight days.” 

“Of course, Pepper.” 

She scooped up her purse and paused beside Loki, who was perched at the breakfast bar by the kitchen, and kissed his cheek. “Survive.”

“Pepper...” he whispered, desperately not wanting her to go, but not daring to tell her not to. 

“Survive, Loki.” 

“Pepper--” Tony rushed to try to keep the elevator door from sealing, but Pepper mashed the button to close it, and was gone. 

Loki folded his hands in his lap, and didn’t look up from the papers in front of him. He stayed silent. The idea of being left up here with Tony without Pepper as a buffer was unbearable. For the last five months, Tony either pretended Loki wasn’t there, or insulted him. Pepper had tried desperately to get them to interact in the first month. It had been a manic effort to distance them all from the suicide. The second month, she had spent a lot of time crying, and Tony had consoled her, or cried with her. Loki had wept, too, but after the first time Tony had slapped him for it when Pepper wasn’t around to see, he had made sure to only do it behind closed, locked doors, while Tony was sleeping.

It hadn’t been until the third month that Pepper had decided it was time to show Loki footage of what he had done that had been so horrible. Tony had elected not to watch it with them. In fact, he’d gotten very, very drunk while they watched it, a feat only accomplished by consuming most of the alcohol in the penthouse. Tony’s drunkenness at the edge of his consciousness had only made it harder to watch himself-- undoubtedly himself-- gleefully preside over the slaughter, direct or indirect, of over fourteen hundred people by the Chitauri. There was even footage of him killing a man in Germany by boring the man’s eye out with some device, and relishing openly in the fear of the humans running from him. 

Loki couldn’t sleep without seeing the horror on the faces of those Germans, or bodies hitting the ground outside of skyscrapers upset by Chitauri Leviathan, or the face of the son whose name he would never know. 

He had already failed to survive. Six weeks ago he had waited for Pepper and Tony to be asleep, and he had walked off the edge of Stark Tower. It had been excruciating for a few minutes, but his body had simply turned blue, and then normal again, and Pepper and Tony had both been angry at him. Natasha Romanoff had come after that, and had asked Loki some questions about how he had healed. She spoke to Pepper and Tony privately, and then left. They replaced the concrete his body had smashed. 

It was clear now that the only capacity in which Tony would be hurt would be if it was not a physical assault. Tony hadn’t even woken up until JARVIS had alerted them of what Loki had done. 

Loki heard a thunk, and felt Tony’s rage mounting. He glanced up. Tony had his head against the elevator, and he hit his forehead against it again, on purpose, and then looked at Loki with hatred so clear that Loki didn’t need to be bonded to the genius man to feel it from those eyes. 

He looked at his hands again, and felt nothing but self-hatred.

There was nothing else to feel. He was a monster. He was incapable of actually helping undo anything that he’d brought to the world. He brought death and disruption and misery. Tony didn’t hate him enough. 

“I’m going for a walk. Try not to jump off anything until I’m back to clean up your fucking mess.” 

The elevator closed. 

On the mantle above the fireplace, there were five stockings. One each for JARVIS, DUM-E, and U. Tony’s. A tuft of cotton and satin where Pepper’s had hung. And then Loki’s. It had been brand new when Pepper had brought it home, this morning. His name was embroidered in gold thread on a dark green velvet, surrounded by swirling stars. He had been deeply touched by her gesture of inclusion. For the first three and a half hours that it had hung on the mantle beside hers, Loki had thought there was some possibility that this might actually work out.

Tony had dropped it into the flames. It was burnt, now, and what wasn’t burnt was scorched black. Tony had even gone so far as to stomp out the fire and hang it back on the mantle. Pepper had promised another one, after slapping Tony. 

Loki walked to the mantle. He turned up the fireplace. He removed the stocking from the hook. Slowly, he pulled the scorched fabric apart, tearing it into chunks the size of shattered pieces of skull, and one by one, he fed them to the flames.


	6. Chapter 6

“I informed you as to where I would be,” Loki said numbly. He was staring again, at a copy of the Voynich Manuscript, as illegible to him as the photo pages he had supposedly scribd at his elbow. 

“You left a post it on the refrigerator door saying you’d be back three days ago.” Tony was trying to be reasonable, to contain his anger. Loki had felt his relief, and the relative calm that followed for the next twenty-four hours, before he’d begun to feel Tony’s annoyance, and spikes of worry and anger. 

Now, Tony was just angry. And Loki just wanted to be left alone. He had been staring at this book and his notes for three days. No one had noticed him, or asked him to leave the library. The lights had gone off, and eight hours later, they would turn back on. He hadn’t slept. He wasn’t completely sure he had drawn breath. 

“We’re going home,” Tony said. 

Loki slid his papers into the binding of the Voynich Manuscript print and closed the book. Tony stepped back, to give Loki room to stand up, and started walking towards the library exit. Loki followed, feeling as though he was made of dry straw. 

Tony didn’t say anything on the drive home, or as they rode up Stark Tower in the elevator. When they got out, he just took off his jacket and hung it up, and poured himself a glass of water, which he drank without looking at Loki.

Loki stood in front of the elevator and waited. When Tony didn’t look at him still, he took off his shoes, and went to his room. He sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the book in his hands.

The sun set. It had been a little before noon when they had arrived back from the library. 

Finally Tony opened Loki’s door and looked at him. Loki didn’t move. He didn’t look up, or slump his shoulders, or blink. Tony closed the door. 

“Do something,” Tony said, and Loki felt his anger spike again. Normally it would make him wince. “Loki. Look at me.” There was a spike of anger again. Loki didn’t move. Tony took a step forward and tore the book from Loki’s lap. It hit the wall and fell to the ground, the binding cracking; the human grabbed Loki by the hair and jerked his head back, forcing him to make eye contact. “Is there anything left in there at all? Are you even conscious? Or does Ryðja Sál keep wiping you until you’re a mannikin?” 

Loki slowly turned his head away. 

“Stop it,” Tony growled. “Stop this. Engage with us, Loki. Stop wincing. Stop hiding from who you were. Stand up and own it and help us.”

Loki closed his eyes. Behind them, a gun was going off. 

Tony’s fingers tightened in his hair and his hand fixed hard on Loki’s jaw, and Loki felt something he had could not remember ever feeling before. 

Tony was kissing him. 

It was bruising. Tony had forced Loki’s mouth open with his fingers and shoved his tongue into Loki’s mouth with such violence that if Loki had needed to breathe he would have choked. He pushed Loki back and down onto the bed, pinned him with his weight, and continued to kiss him with a brutality that Loki had felt before at the wrong end of bricks and knives and chairs. 

Loki realized he was kissing him back. There was something under his skin that was responding to this physical domination-- and he didn’t know, yet, if it was fighting it, or welcoming it. The sudden feeling of this distinct other in his skin scared him, and he pulled away from the kiss, shoving Tony off of him hard enough to send the man tumbling off the bed. He retreated against the headboard, covering his face, waiting for Tony to get up.

Tony was laying on the floor, laughing. Loki didn’t understand. He could feel relief from Tony, and genuine amusement, and other things he couldn’t quite define because he couldn’t remember ever feeling them himself. Loki wiped his face, and tried to keep the feeling of panic in his chest from overtaking him, from forcing him to cry. 

Tony sat up, his hair tousled, and looked across the bed at Loki, still laughing. He shook his head. “Seriously. All this time and the old Loki comes out for a kiss.”

“The old Loki slaughtered thousands,” Loki hissed, suddenly angry just to be connected to the creature he had been before-- before he’d woken up in that pool. 

“The old Loki had a plan that wasn’t waiting to die,” Tony replied, climbing onto the bed and crawling towards Loki. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” 

“Stop it!” Loki shoved Tony back off of the bed again with his foot, something on fire in his chest. “I am not some damsel in distress for you to liberate with kisses or affection. I am the dragon, remember?” He pointed out the window of his room, to one of the skyscrapers still being rebuilt outside of it. “Save your kisses for your wife. Do not-- waste them on the lips of a sick criminal.”

Tony sat up again, annoyed now. “You’re not much of a dragon now, cowering against a headboard and spending most of your day hoping to disappear into the woodwork.”

“You would hardly let me disappear anywhere else, you will not let me disappear into the faceless millions again.”

“I don’t have a choice, Loki. Even if we didn’t have world-saving work to do, I’m kind of walking around with your heart in my chest.”

“Do not pretend I do not know that. I know it a thousand times over when you look at me and I see my own heart hating me through your eyes.” 

“It’s not much more of a cakewalk having that heart spewing hate into your guts every minute of every day! If I’d known during the invasion that you hated yourself this much I would have gotten you a therapist, not advocated a goddamn gag!”

“Of course I hate myself. According to our records there are entire worlds that hate me. You do not hate me nearly enough for the things I have done.”

“I don’t hate you!” Tony shouted, throwing his arms up. “I don’t! I don’t think I fucking could if I tried! I did when I dragged you over that counter, thinking you were the Loki that killed Phil Coulson. But you were terrified. You might as well have been any other guy off the street working at an ice cream shop trying to make ends meet. I felt horrible. And I tried to go after you and that’s when Turner picked us up. When I woke up and saw you on that mirror display I felt fucking horrible. I could see in your eyes how scared you were. You had no idea what was going on. You were literally just another innocent bystander, you had no idea why people hated you, and we dragged you into all of this and told you that you were a horrible monster and gave you all these reasons to hate yourself and you-- fuck, Loki. You’re like a kid. You just walk through the world with your hands open in front of you and you take whatever falls into them even if it’s a big fucking pile of shit. And then you apologize, because it’s shit. We fucked you over, Loki. Asgard sent you back to us a blank slate hoping you would relearn compassion or something, and the only thing we taught you was that you were so worth hating that you walked off a ninety-seventh floor balcony and then apologized for cracking the pavement.”

Loki was silent. Waves of emotion crashed through him, and he could not tell what belonged to Tony, and what belonged to him. It had only gotten more and more muddy as they had lived together, as they had shared a heart. Anger, sadness, regret, bitterness, self-recrimination, they all whirled around in his chest, and he wanted to curl into a ball, and be held or left alone. No one had ever held him in his memory. It didn’t keep him from wanting it. 

The bed dipped as Tony crawled onto it again, and despite the fact that Loki was so much taller than the human engineer, Tony pulled him against his chest and held him. Loki just curled, to try to stay small, and a moment later, he began to silently cry. Tony didn’t stop him, or shush him, or tell him not to. The crying quietly mounted into sobbing, which became a gasping, full-body-shaking breakdown, and Tony never let go of him, just held him harder. Loki felt wetness on the back of his neck, and knew Tony wept as well. 

It was a long time before Loki stopped trembling. He wondered if Tony had fallen asleep, but when he tried to pull away, those arms tightened. He stopped, and lay still. 

Finally, he spoke. 

“You don’t hate me.”

“No. All that hate you feel from me-- that’s you. I can’t control it. It’s too much.” Tony’s voice was tired, and full of regret. “I’m sorry. Emotional regulation has never been a thing I’ve been good at.”

Loki was quiet for a moment, and then he turned over in Tony’s arms, to face him. His green eyes were red still with tears, his lips cracked and dry. He wet them, and pressed them together. 

“I think I should be in a hospital, Tony.”


	7. Chapter 7

Pepper held Tony in the dark, as the man sobbed openly against her chest. 

“You did the right thing,” she whispered, kissing the top of his head and rubbing his back. “You did the right thing. It’s okay. I love you.”

“He’s so scared,” Tony sobbed. 

“I know. I know you are too.”

“We’re so scared. He doesn’t want to be alone there. He’s so afraid.”

“I know, Tony. I know.” She held him tighter, and knew she was holding them both. For the first time, she realized how tightly entwined the two men were. For the first time, she felt how disconnected she was from Tony. She silenced the sadness that crept into her heart and whispered into Tony’s hair. “I love you.”

==========

Clint stood by the fireplace mantle, his New Year’s Eve champagne flute in hand. He hooked a green and gold stocking on his finger and held it up. It swung slowly, laden heavily with gifts. 

“Hey, who hasn’t opened their Christmas stocking yet?” he drawled, slightly drunkenly, at Tony, just across the room. 

Tony stiffened, and Natasha noticed Pepper put her hand on Tony’s back, between his shoulder blades. She recognized the grounding contact for what it was. 

“Loki,” he replied simply, and finished his flute of champagne in a gulp. 

Clint looked awkward, and put the stocking back. He swayed for a moment, and glanced at Steve for a rescue, but the supersoldier just shrugged. “Sorry,” Clint mumbled into his champagne flute.

“It’s okay,” Pepper whispered, easily audible in the now dead quiet room. The party had been awkward already with the obvious absence of the amnesiatic god, and she was simply glad Thor still had not returned from Asgard. The Avengers and SHIELD knew that Loki had been hospitalized willingly. SHIELD was monitoring him closely, for obvious reasons. 

“How is he doing?” Natasha asked, her voice soft. Tony pressed his lips together, but everyone wanted to know. Everyone knew how different he was from the warmongering lunatic they had battled in New York. 

“It’s hard,” he admitted. “He spends a lot of time alone. They give him books, and he journals, and he has a regular therapy schedule. They are focusing primarily on emotional skill-building. They’re handling him like a trauma victim. Which is what he is, I guess. He’s lonely, mostly. That’s the hardest for him.”

“Get him a dog,” Clint blurted. “They’ll let him have a dog. He’s fuckin’ Loki. It’ll do him good. Affection all around. You can’t be alone with a dog around.” He opened his mouth to say something else, and then shut it, looking embarrassed. “Sorry. I’ll lay off the sauce.”

“No, that’s brilliant,” Bruce said, adjusting his glasses. “A dog is exactly what he needs. And they will let him have one. A therapy animal, so to speak. It will keep him busy, and give him affection, and something to do besides sink in his own head.”

“It would be optimal, actually,” Natasha said. “He might get over-attached to it, but that can’t be a bad thing for us. If what you say about his depression threatening our ability to ultimately deal with Thanos is true, it’s absolutely worth it.” 

Tony looked at Pepper, his rock, his emotional savior at the moment. She nodded. 

“I’ll call a breeder in the morning,” she said.


	8. Chapter 8

The snow outside of the hospital had just been plowed, but it came down thick enough that Tony’s shoes crunched through half an inch with every step. 

Today was hard for Loki, and Tony could feel it. He yearned deeply for something that he couldn’t articulate, and his frustration made him melancholy. Tony suspected it was the snow. He almost slipped when the dog bundled in his jacket squirmed and made an unhappy sound, wanting to be able to see what was going on. He shushed it and pulled the door open. 

The director of the hospital was unhappy with the idea, but she declined to argue with Tony Stark, or for that matter, his wife, who had battered her into compliance over the phone. And so instead she lead him to the private set of rooms Loki inhabited, and spoke with his therapist, a black-haired woman with a distinct fierceness who turned her eyes on Tony for a long moment before shooing the director away. 

“He’s made a lot of progress in the past week,” Dr. Gerder said. “I think it’s the snow. Don’t give him any bullshit. And don’t bring up the kid, whatever you do. Especially when you’re giving him an infant animal. This could do a lot or this could cripple him. I don’t know why you didn’t bring him here months ago.”

Tony liked her immediately. 

She disappeared inside, and Tony waited in the corridor, the squirming puppy becoming more impatient now that it was inside and still wrapped up in his coat. He scratched it between its eyes and shushed it again, and it stilled, huffing slightly. He was almost sad to be saying goodbye to it for a while. It had been at the house for only a night and he was already a little attached to it, himself. Nine weeks old, with one blue and one amber eye, the Australian Shepherd puppy had immediately charmed him at the breeder’s by crawling onto his lap and promptly falling asleep on his back with his paws hanging off of Tony’s knees. He’d handled all of the puppies, but this one had won his heart. And well, given that it was Loki’s heart, it seemed like a good match.

Dr. Gerder emerged, and held the door open for Tony. He followed her into a sitting room, outfitted with a television behind plexiglass and two sofas, with a low table that had a tray of coffee and snacks on it. 

Curled on one end of the sofa, in a black bathrobe and deep blue pajamas, was Loki, barefoot and looking relatively peaceful. Dr. Gerder indicated that Tony could sit. 

“I’ll be in the next room,” she said, looking at Loki, who nodded. Tony understood that she was giving them privacy, but being available if Loki needed to not be around Tony any more. She disappeared. 

Tony stood beside the other sofa, holding the puppy in his jacket. Loki took a moment to look up at him, and Tony could feel the desperate loneliness crest and break inside of him. Or them. Tony wasn’t sure it belonged to Loki alone in that moment.

“Hello.” Loki was clearly not sure what to say. The dog in Tony’s jacket wiggled. 

“I brought you something,” Tony said. “I think it wants to get out.” 

Loki raised an eyebrow, looking at the wiggling jacket. Tony unzipped it, carefully, and the puppy twisted and looked at Loki. 

Tony could feel confusion and hesitance, and below it, rising, hope. 

“I... do I get to... I get to keep it here?” he asked, and Tony was immediately proud of Loki. When he had left, he would never have been able to speak such a question so directly. Three weeks had made a distinct difference already. 

“Yeah,” Tony said, scooping the puppy up under its belly and walking around the table to set it down on Loki’s lap. Glee erupted through them, strong enough to make Tony giggle a little, uncharacteristically, and he grinned down at Loki. The puppy had its nose in the god’s face, sniffing and licking. The god ran his fingers over the incredibly soft fur and gave a hiccup of a laugh, and looked up at Tony. He was surprised to see that Loki was crying. 

“Hey.” Tony sat beside the god, and the puppy turned, walked over to Tony and licked his knuckle before walking back over to Loki and flopping comfortably in his lap, much as he had on Tony’s. “What are those for?”

Loki wiped at his face. “I am sorry,” he said. “Anne-- ah, Dr. Gerder, encourages me to... to allow feelings to run their course. Instead of trying to temper them for... for your sake.”

“Good,” Tony said. “It’s been way easier, especially in the last week, to deal with... the shared-ness. It’s been easier to... just sort of let them wash over. It’s been easier to focus in the last week than it has been since... since Turner.” He’d almost brought up the kid. There was a spike of emotion that probably had to do with it anyway, sharp and digging in his chest, and once again Tony wasn’t certain if it was Loki’s emotion or his own. Loki was dealing with it, though, taking deep, even breaths and petting the soft belly of the now sleeping puppy on his lap. 

“On the day we decided to bring me here, you said I was another innocent bystander.” Those intense green eyes met Tony’s. “Turner mocked me specifically about the things I had done, but the way you spoke, it was as if you believed I was not a purposeful target.”

“You weren’t,” Tony replied. “Turner openly admitted, after capture, that you were convenient. He had been tracking me because he thought I would be the easiest of the Avengers to subdue without my suit. When he realized who you were, he bagged you because it was another way to fuck with the Avengers.”

“I do not understand why a mortal would do such a thing to a group that-- that saved them from the Chitauri. And me.”

‘A mortal’. Tony wondered where that had come from. Loki had never categorized humans as other than what he was, even after the whole ‘divinity’ revelation, before now. He wondered if the constant therapy was coaxing Loki’s personality back to light, even through the Ryðja Sál. 

“People do crazy things when their careers are interrupted. His clearance level wasn’t high enough for him to work on the Helicarrier after the Avengers were brought to it, so he was stuck on a land post. He decided the Avengers were personally responsible for his career upset and...” Tony shrugged. He still didn’t want to talk about what had happened in that warehouse. Having to talk to SHIELD about it was more than enough. 

“Tony...” Loki’s long-fingered hand wrapped around Tony’s, and squeezed lightly. Tony took a deep breath and looked at the god, whose expression was gentle, and worried. “I want you to come to therapy with me. Once a week. We have a unique complication, and a terrific difficulty ahead of us. Your past is not any more without difficulty than mine, even if I do not remember mine. If not for your own sanity... it would help me, with mine.” 

Tony shook his head. “No. Absolutely not. Therapy-- I tried to talk to Bruce about shit once, and it was a no-go. I can’t trust a stranger with my bullshit, Loki. It’s bad enough I can’t drink myself into oblivion any more. I’m not spilling my guts to a shrink.”

“Dr. Banner is not a psychologist,” Loki pointed out. “And Dr. Gerder is not a stranger. I trust her. SHIELD trusts her. Natasha came by last week to visit. Even she liked her.”

“Quit trying to pressure me into this, Loki, I’m not gonna do it.” Tony scowled, and the spike of anger that went through him made Loki frown. 

“So it is acceptable to you that I am the one doing the work to make this circumstance functional?”

“I’m functional, Loki.” 

“Before Turner you were a functional alcoholic. That hardly qualifies you as healthy.”

“I’m not going to therapy. It’s not happening.”

“If you cannot participate in the improvement of your own emotional health...” Tony could feel the betrayal Loki felt at this. The anger and indignation, mixed heavily with Tony’s own fear and anger at being pressured into it. Loki looked down at the sleeping puppy, and combed his fingers through his black hair, letting the anger be present, rather than fighting it. Tony was fighting his. It was incredibly strange, to try to quell his own while Loki allowed his to settle and turn, slowly, into determination. 

“Why did you kiss me?”

Tony let go of a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding with a quiet hiss, and ran his hand over his face. He held onto his beard for a moment and then let his hand fall into his lap with a shrug. 

“You wouldn’t respond. In the past five months I’d yelled at you, scolded you, told you off, suggested as neutrally as I could while trying to deal with your self-hatred... probably not that neutrally. I don’t know. It was the only thing I could think of. It just suddenly occurred to me that it’s likely no one had told you that you were desirable in any way for a really long time. Even before the Ryðja Sál. I mean, no one knows how long you were with the Chitauri. Thor said that time can warp really easily between realms and that you fell between them. I bolstered my self-image for most of my adult life by finding people who would tell me I was attractive. I figured you might respond to it. I was right.”

Loki continued to stroke the exposed belly of the sleeping puppy, not meeting Tony’s eyes. There was gratitude, raw and relieved, and a quiet, painful ache that felt like an old wound opened again. Tony frowned as he watched Loki’s face, the god’s brows drawn, lips slightly downturned, watched that adam’s apple move as he swallowed. 

“You’re beautiful, Loki,” Tony said. He felt a sudden need to reassure the man, and he couldn’t tell if it was because Loki craved that reassurance, or because Tony felt that he needed to know. “It was a bid to get you to react, but that doesn’t mean you’re not genuinely attractive. You are. You always were. Even when you were trying to kill us all.” The last thing Tony needed was Loki shying away from remembering himself because of something like feeling unattractive. 

Loki gave a little burst of dry, soundless laugh at that, and shook his head. 

“I’m surprised you noticed during all of the mad scramble to find the Tesseract.” 

“I notice hot people no matter what I’m doing,” he replied. “It’s part of my wiring.”

“You must be very distracted during Avengers missions. Your entire team is not unattractive.”

“True, but with the exception of whatever’s going on between Romanov and Barton, you don’t date coworkers.”

“You married your secretary.” 

Tony laughed. “Okay, you got me. But she was my co-CEO by that time. We get to write our own company policy.” 

Loki smiled at that and shook his head, a coil of amused exasperation moving through them. There was another moment of comfortable silence before Loki asked:

“Have you told Pepper you kissed me?”

A clutch of guilt told Loki all he needed to know. Neither of them spoke. The puppy yawned, stretched, and slid awkwardly off of Loki’s lap. It promptly climbed back up to lick his chin and whine. 

“He is going to urinate soon,” Loki said, and scooped the puppy up, to head for the ensuite bathroom. Tony stood and followed, watched Loki lay down a mound of paper towels and straighten as the puppy sniffed at it. 

“I should go.” 

“Puppy training not your forté?” Loki smiled again. There was another clutch of guilt as Tony realized how much he liked to see Loki smile. 

“I’ll come back. For therapy.” Anything to assuage the guilt. Loki’s relief effectively overpowered it, and he reached for Tony’s hand, to squeeze it in thanks. Tony squeezed back.


	9. Chapter 9

Light refracted through glass and raindrops on the window beside the cafe table where Pepper and Tony had been having breakfast together at for several years. This morning was no different at a glance. Pepper sat with her small fingers wrapped around her coffee mug, staring out at the city packed so tightly below. The skyscraper nearest, that had sustained considerable damage from of the behemoths the Chitauri had turned loose on Manhattan, was finally in its final stages of repair. Inside, walls were being put in; floors being laid. Life was returning to normal. Manhattan was healing, sure and determined as its residents. 

Tony was drinking orange juice, just orange juice, and it looked like he might even be having some toast this morning. Something whole-grain with nuts and dried fruit. A real breakfast, maybe. 

He folded the morning paper and slid it to Pepper. 

She didn’t pick it up. Instead, she focused those pretty hazel eyes on Tony’s face for a moment, and then looked quickly down, and away. 

“I can’t do this,” she whispered.

Tony looked up from his handheld, his brows knit. A roll of apprehension tightened his stomach. 

“Can’t do what, Pep?” He tried to keep it light, but it came out slightly breathy, unsure if he wanted the answer. 

She took a breath, and when she let it out, he could hear the tightness of her throat. His stomach rolled again, and his own throat tightened in sympathy with hers. 

“I can’t be the outside person.”

“Pepper--”

“No. Tony, let me... let me say my piece.”

Tony quieted, for once. Pepper noted it as another change since Tony had started therapy, a year ago. Another way he had changed for Loki Odinson. She understood, cerebrally, that these were survival tactics; Tony and Loki were literally sharing emotions. It was impossible to survive and be happy without working, together and on their own, towards happiness. That meant changing habits, defense mechanisms, that had served them. She could see in her husband’s face that he knew what was coming, and was letting her bring it on her own terms. He wasn’t trying to control the circumstances, the conditions. It was a struggle, but he was letting it go. 

They were changes he had made to live with Loki, not to live with her. And she appreciated those changes, but they didn’t bring them closer. She was becoming... vestigial. 

“I can’t be the outside person,” she said again. “It was hard, before Loki went to the hospital. You two were a mess of emotions all the time, you trying to deal with his self-loathing, him trying to deal with your emotional escapism, both of you trying to shut down or open up or escape. I thought that was unbearable. And it was.” 

Tony stayed quiet. He could feel their relationship crumbling. Feel her wrenching herself free. He swallowed, hard. He should have known. He should have seen. He had been so focused, this entire last year, on Loki. On seeing him three times a week, going to therapy twice with him, going to his own therapy twice a week, on helping to train the puppy, on figuring out how to deal with the eruptions of visceral memory that seemed to only happen in Loki when Tony was there. And the whole time-- he’d only remembered his and Pepper’s anniversary because JARVIS had reminded him in time to set up something.

He’d remembered the six-month mark of Loki going to the hospital on his own. 

“I love you, Tony,” she continued. “I’ll always love you. And I know you’ll love me. But you’re not mine. And the heart you have doesn’t have room for me in it. The relationship you have with Loki doesn’t have room for me.”

“Pepper, no,” Tony whispered, and he knew it came out breathless. 

“I’ve made arrangements already.” It was less a series of words, and more of a mumble at the table.

“We can talk about this,” Tony croaked, and reached forward for her hand, but she curled it around her coffee cup again, and did not let him take it. The iron around his insides turned colder, and tighter, and he was more desperate.

“You want to go to therapy with me too, now?” 

“Please! Pepper, I can’t lose you. I can’t. You’re the eye of this-- this storm-- you’re my sanity, you’ve always been the part of me I couldn’t function without. You’ve made me a decent man--”

“No, Tony. You made you a decent man. For Loki. I was just the stable base you launched yourself from.” 

“I need you.”

“No, Tony. You need Loki. And he’s coming home soon.” 

“What about--”

“The boy?”

Silence fell between them, and they both felt the residual fear and sadness of that day again. 

“Yes.”

“I can still carry him. I will still carry him. I--” her voice caught, and she pressed her lips together, hard, and chewed her words for a moment. “I won’t give up our child.”

Tony could not find words. His throat was too tight to speak, anyway, and damn it, he could feel himself about to start crying. He heard Pepper get up from her chair, and felt her warm arms wrap around his shoulders. He pressed his face against her neck, and gave a strangled sob. 

“I love you,” he croaked. 

“I love you too,” she whispered, kissing the top of his head. “I love you too.”

===========

“We lost her.”

“Yes.”

“What are we going to do?”

“You’ll come home. Settle in. We’ll keep looking. Keep... keep working.”

“No, Tony. What are we going to do without her?”

Tony met Loki’s eyes, and swallowed hard, the pain of loss crashing over him all over again, keening and raw and desperate. The dog raised its head, at Loki’s feet, looking up at them and whining as Loki wiped tears from his cheekbones forcefully, trying to stay focused. 

“We’ll keep going,” Tony croaked. “For her. For... for the boy. For all of us.”


	10. Chapter 10

It was bittersweet.

Tony knew what bittersweet was. The smell of it, the taste of it on the back of his tongue, like the scotch he’d ordered in dives to dull the whirling in his head for so many years, scraping the inside of his skull and telling him over and over and over in a myriad of voices all of the minutae that made these moments less than perfect.

No alcohol could soften those voices now, but he didn’t need it. Deep breaths, imagining ice cubes squeezed in his palms, he watched the car he’d sent for Loki roll around the corner, nondescript silver-gray and so much cleaner than most of the cars in New York. He realized he’d swallowed six or seven times in the last second, that his mouth was dry. 

Being busy had kept him from being lonely. Therapy had kept him from being lonely. Mourning-- mourning her was so much cleaner than mourning his parents, his trust and relationship with Obadiah, Dr. Yinsen... it had been such a sane mourning. The mess was-- contained, parcelled into pieces he could digest with the help of the ever-patient Dr. Gerder. He was in no hurry. Neither was she, nor Loki, and in so many ways, they were such good patients, such deliberate and studious patients-- 

The door of the car opened and a red merle-coated Australian Shepherd dog bounded out of it, jumped, landed just in front of Tony. It jumped again, as if wanting to jump on him, but just sort of hopped instead, standing on its back legs again and making a sound in its throat of excitement before falling back to all fours and running back to the car, barking once before returning to Tony.

“Talus,” Tony laughed at the dog as it turned a tight circle, wanting both head and rump scratches at once with an obvious smile on its face. He used both of his hands to scratch the dog and neck and hip, grinning at the dog. It was not yet full grown, but Loki had been fastidious in training. Talus knew almost thirty distinct commands and was just over a year old.

The dog sat on Tony’s foot, looked up at him with that obvious smile, and Tony looked up at the car again. 

Loki was getting out, straightening to his impressive height in a way that Tony was very used to seeing, now, in the hospital. Not so much here, at the foot of the building he’d tried to murder Tony from years ago, a scant handful of yards from where Loki had struck concrete in an attempt to murder himself--

“It’s... strange,” Loki admitted, closing the car door, struggling alongside Tony to name the discord of being here, in such a different state than the last time. 

“Strange is a word for it,” Tony agreed. 

“Bittersweet.” The cheap scotch word, though scotch was neither bitter, nor sweet. Not any that Tony enjoyed, anyway. Maybe that was why the association stuck; bittersweet was a smoky word. A warning of a fire inside. A funeral pyre.

“Yes.” 

They stood facing each other for a long time, Talus the dog looking up at them with its tongue lolling happily out of the side of its mouth, before the sound of the car Loki arrived in pulling away from the curb snapped them both from their shared emotional experience of the word bittersweet.

It started raining as soon as they got inside. 

Tony wasn’t really sure how, and it didn’t seem to matter much, but when the elevator doors opened to his penthouse, he and Loki were kissing, and it felt greedy and licentious and exactly what he wanted, and exactly what Loki wanted, and when they staggered into the living room and broke for a moment, Loki’s heart fluttered with a moment of doubt in Tony’s chest. Tony crushed that doubt, completely, by stepping close to the lost god again, taking his jaw in his hand, and kissing him again with all the force he could, pouring into him how much he wanted. 

There were no more flutters of doubt between them as Loki picked Tony up, luggage and dog forgotten, and pushed him down against the black leather of the couch. The kisses were deep then, and Tony’s skin was on fire, and Loki’s touch was curiously cool and everything he wanted right now. 

The rain was hammering so hard on the windows that the skyline of Manhattan was a gray blur. Loki thought he heard thunder even through the soundproof glass, but for once, he was not distracted by it; the only matter of importance was the mouth of the man under him, and that man’s hand on his chest, pulling his shirt off impatiently. 

He jumped when lightning struck the tower, the thunder deafening even through the glass and insulation, and Talus started to bark loudly.

JARVIS was talking suddenly, and they were no longer kissing, he and Tony. Tony’s hands were on Loki’s wrists, and they sat up, Loki looking outside, and Tony looking at a display JARVIS had projected. 

“Loki-- Loki do you remember anything about--”

“Tony--”

“This is going to sound really strange, okay--”

“Tony--”

“But go with it, I need you to tell me if you remember at all--”

“Tony, look,” Loki squeezed Tony’s hand, and Tony turned his head to look outside. 

Through the gray obscuring rain, Tony could see a tall, red-caped form supporting an equally towering gold figure; they were stumbling through the driving rain towards the door. 

“Thor,” Tony murmured, and Loki winced, though he couldn’t quite remember why he would wince at the name of a brother Tony had told him about in therapy, even if they had fought. Loki thought he had forgiven whatever problems had been between them. Tony’s eyes were on him, and he squeezed Loki’s wrists again and kissed his cheek gently. “I won’t let them in if you don’t want me to.”

“Let them in,” Loki murmured. “It’s important. It has to be, or they wouldn’t be here.”

“Are you sure?” Tony’s eyes hadn’t left Loki’s face, but when the lost god nodded, and Tony’s examination of their shared heart turned up none of that paralyzed fear he had learned to identify. He got to his feet as the figures reached the door, and crossed quickly to let them in while Talus climbed up on the couch and sat squarely on Loki’s lap, licking the god’s face and whining slightly.

Thor lurched through the door, and the gold-armored figure with him tried to help to compensate, but they were both off-balance. Loki was there suddenly, with that same inexplicable quickness he had managed the day he, Tony, and Pepper returned from the Helicarrier. He was taking the heaviness of the gold-armored man from Thor’s arms, and he knew the dark-skinned Aesir was significant in his presence, but he wasn’t sure why. 

“I’m getting blankets,” Tony announced, as he pushed the soaking wet thunder god in the direction of a deep leather chair and disappeared down a hall. Talus approached Thor slowly, sniffing at his boots, as if trying to decide if he was an acceptable presence.

“His health will return soon, brother,” Thor was assuring him, and it alleviated some guilt in Loki he didn’t remember manifesting. He laid the gold-armored man on the leather couch he and Tony had been on just a minute before, and removed his helmet carefully, setting it beside him on the glass coffee table. 

“I cannot remember his name,” Loki whispered, looking up at Thor. 

“He is Heimdall, All-Seeing,” Thor panted. “And he is why you will soon no longer be bound by the Ryðja Sál.”

“What?” That was Tony, standing with a huge armful of blankets and towels by the fireplace. 

Thor looked over at Tony, and reached out to allow Talus to sniff his hand, and then to gently pet the dog. “He has been watching,” he said, and looked back at Loki. “Since you arrived on Midgard. He saw all you have done, how hard you have fought to overcome what was left in you by the Ryðja Sál, and the emptiness it left as well.” 

Loki looked down at the dark-skinned Aesir, and accepted a towel from Tony, gently patting the water off of his face. It was so hard to believe anyone in Asgard had cared enough to think of him, and for a while, in the hospital, it had been bitter. He had worked hard to let it go. “He has seen me all this time?” 

“Yes,” Thor said. “And yesterday, we were supposed to rebind you. The Ryðja Sál was never intended, as a spell, to be forever; it must be renewed once a year by all those who bound the subject in the first place. But Heimdall came to me and told me all you’ve done and been through, all you have fought. He said--”

Heimdall made a sound, his eyes moving under his lids, and everyone was quiet, looking down at him as he reached up towards the towel on the side of his face, long dark fingers grasping for it, and then his bright gold eyes opened. 

Loki could remember-- remember!-- feeling those eyes on him, in another life, and remembered the feeling of slipping away from them, like fading into the background, a matter of forgetting his own importance in a place to avert that omniscient gaze from himself. 

The gold-eyed man smiled, and his eyes closed again, and relaxed. Loki let go of a breath he didn’t realize he was holding, and looked up at Tony, needing the reassurance of his heart-mate’s face. Tony understood, squeezed his shoulder, and handed a towel and a blanket to Thor, who gratefully began to dry himself off. 

“You said the Ryðja Sál wasn’t supposed to be permanent.” Tony wanted to know more. It wasn’t a very subtle request for more information.

“No. It was designed to be a way to help warriors returning from battles that scarred them inside; here, you call it post-traumatic stress disorder, I believe. The Ryðja Sál would be applied, the warrior would go back to his family to be reminded of how he was loved, and after a year, if he was fortified enough, he would be released. You--” Thor’s voice cracked, and he looked down in shame, and then back up at his brother. “You were the first time it was ever used as a punishment. Odin only let you choose where you would be abandoned. I didn’t understand why you chose New York City until Heimdall explained how much Tony Stark had done for you.”

Heimdall sat up, slowly, and wiped his face with the towel. He heaved a sigh, still fatigued, clearly, but done resting for now. 

“It will break soon,” he said. “I cannot see as much as I could, but I can see that.”

Loki’s hand came up and tightened around Tony’s wrist, feeling suddenly terrified. Tony touched his face, making him focus on his face. “It’s going to be okay. You’re not going anywhere. You’re ‘fortified’ now.”

“I’m frightened,” Loki whispered. Naming the emotion to each other helped them move through it, one of many careful strategies they had built in therapy together.

“It’s okay to be frightened,” Tony said. “I am too. But we’re not in danger.” Acknowledge, identify, reinforce safety. More tools, more strategies. The dog, raised while these techniques were being forged between them, recognized their tone and left Thor to lay against Loki’s leg, where he usually would sit during therapy of any kind. 

“Why are you here?” Loki demanded, looking at Thor again, suddenly not sure they were, in fact, safe.

“We defied the Allfather in refusing to re-bind you in the Ryðja Sál,” Thor replied. “Heimdall saw your work to become healed.”

“I have never seen someone try so hard as you have,” Heimdall said, his voice sonorous and certain. “Even before the Iron Man Stark you struggled. I could not in good conscience bind you again when you had healed so much. I informed your brother; we refused, and the Allfather has banished us for our refusal.”

“How could Mother allow--” Loki began, and stopped, his green eyes widening. He could feel it coming now, cracks starting to form in the void of memory that he had gotten so used to. Tony slid over the back of the couch to sit beside him, to hold his hand. The racing heart in his chest told him what was going on. 

If his emotions had been waves drowning him, this was a tsunami beating against a poorly constructed tenement wall. Chunks of memory were falling back into him, small flecks at first, then entire bricks, and suddenly huge segments of wall and support structure and he felt like the entire building was crashing down around him, every new piece of information bombarding him with remembered emotional responses. He was dimly aware of Talus whining, and Tony’s arms tightening around him, and it was enough to allow him to draw breath as the next wave struck him. Curiously, this one was not so terrifying, though it was so much darker-- memories of loneliness and anger and bitterness, and the actions he had taken as a result of those emotions. Actions he regretted even before he remembered them. 

He gave a strangled sound as he remembered throwing Tony out of this very tower, and grasped at Tony harder. He heard the man murmuring in his ear, reassuring him, and Talus was nuzzling his chest, still slightly whining, and the pain and regret and the spike of self-hatred that came with that memory passed through him, and he was able to relax again, a little. 

The last wave was not nearly so crushing. He saw everything that had brought him here-- his punishment, his careful selection of being left here, exactly here, where he would inevitably be found, where he would inevitably find--

“Tony,” he whispered, panting, and looked at the man, whose face showed nothing but concern-- whose shared heart held nothing but--

“JARVIS, make sure our guests are comfortable,” Tony said, and he stood, pulling Loki to his feet gently, and supporting him as they disappeared into the master suite. 

Tony turned on the shower, and guided Loki into it, and followed after discarding his jeans. He undid Loki’s trousers and pushed them down, guiding the lost god to sit on a little wooden bench, and kicked the trousers into the corner. 

They were silent as Tony carefully washed and rinsed Loki’s hair; he paused every so often, when Loki’s emotions crested, to hold him under the hot running water until they were less overwhelming, and resumed. He was working conditioner into that long black hair when Loki spoke at last. 

“How?”

“How what?” Tony’s voice was gentle, and calm.

“How can you-- how can you love me, with what I am? With what I have done?”

Tony ran his fingers through that thick black hair, making sure the conditioner was fully distributed, and turned Loki’s face towards him. Slowly, with purpose, he lowered his mouth to Loki’s, and kissed him, a light brush of lips first, and then with more pressure, slightly sucking at his lower lip for a moment, flicking his tongue over the slightly swollen skin and then the kiss was deep, his tongue gliding over Loki’s, tasting, gently sucking. It lasted briefly, before Tony pulled slowly away, giving another brush of a kiss on his lips, and one last firmly planted on Loki’s forehead. “Like that,” he whispered.

Loki could not be certain if he was crying under the water, but if he was, it wasn’t sadness any more. 

They kissed again, and Loki pulled Tony onto his lap, the human’s thighs on either side of his hips, and their tongues glided and massaged each other as Loki’s hands stroked down Tony’s back, cupping his ass and squeezing slightly. He found he was very aware of Tony’s erection against his abdomen, and his own pressing up against the man’s scrotum. 

The kiss broke, and Loki drew breath, but Tony spoke first, a whisper: “Yes.”

Loki lifted Tony’s hips, his fingers finding his opening as his mouth found Tony’s again, and it was his body, not his mind, that worked his first spell since the suicide; a muscle memory of running his finger around the edge of that opening, relaxing Tony and filling him with a gentle oil. It brought a sound to Tony’s lips, humming against Loki’s, a sound of want and need. Tony’s cock was heavy against Loki’s abdomen, and Loki’s now brushed Tony’s opening, which brought another sound from Tony. 

They stopped kissing again for a moment, and they both drew deep breaths as the tip of Loki slid into Tony. Loki let it go slowly as he continued to slowly lower Tony’s hips down over him, but Tony held his breath for a few moments, before letting it go all at once and then gasping again. He panted slightly as Loki filled him, and when Loki was all the way inside him, Tony put his hands on either side of Loki’s jaw, and kissed his forehead again, his breaths hot and short over the lost god’s skin. 

“Like this,” he whispered. “I love you just like this.” 

===========

Loki woke tangled around Tony’s limbs, and the sun was rising with an exceptional clarity over Manhattan, bathing their skin in orange rays undampened by the smog that usually filtered the sunlight of New York. The rain had cleared all of it away. Talus was sprawled at their feet, asleep on his back, and Tony, beautiful Tony, clever, determined, faithful, good Tony, who loved him unconditionally, slept in his arms undisturbed. 

All of the memories were still there, perfectly placed and accessible, clear as the daylight that warmed his skin. Some of them were old wounds, deep and wide, but where he had been haemorrhaging himself through those wounds, even while he had not known the shape of them, they were now sealed, cauterized shut, the damaged tissue of his self healing under a thick skin he had woven with the man laying next to him. 

Tony made a quiet noise. His eyes fluttered open, and then closed as he stretched his limbs around Loki and smiled sleepily. Loki pulled Tony closer, and kissed him gently. 

“Everything is going to change,” Loki whispered against Tony’s lips.

“It doesn’t have to,” Tony replied, and gently pulled away, stroking Loki’s black hair from his face and running his thumb over his lips. 

“Yes, it does.” Loki kissed the pad of his thumb and gave him a little smile. “I know how we will be able to fight Thanos. How to keep him from coming anywhere near as close to domination as we thought he would come. We can prevent it all.”

Tony’s brow creased; instead of relief, Loki could feel Tony’s heart twist, thinking of the life of the son they had watched die to bring them what information they had until now. He had felt that very ache before, many times. He placed his hand over Tony’s chest, tracing the scar of where his arc reactor had been taken out, and where his own heart had found residence. 

“I remember how we will create him,” he whispered, and kissed Tony gently. “I remember his name.”

Through the pain, that brought a smile. For the first time since he had died in Loki’s arms, the thought of the child they would bear was sweet. 

Perhaps the road ahead would be difficult. There was nothing, however, that could be taken from them-- not when they were whole, at last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for sticking through this. I welcome all constructive criticism and try my best to respond to all comments I get!
> 
> Special thanks:  
> My personal viking, Tumblr's mysweetbodycount  
> And glasslogic, who saved me from being artist-less at the last minute with composite-art wizardry!


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